


the sun is often out

by inquisitioned



Category: The Maze Runner (2014), The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: AU, M/M, suicide TW
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2014-11-19
Updated: 2014-11-19
Packaged: 2018-02-26 05:55:54
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,410
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2640584
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/inquisitioned/pseuds/inquisitioned
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Before Newt turned six, he’d been to three different homes, across an entire ocean, and to two different states, but a week after his birthday, he was introduced, sullen and out of tears to cry, to a place called The Glade.</p>
            </blockquote>





	the sun is often out

**Author's Note:**

> An old fic, reposted from tumblr. If you'd like to see me cry about nalby on a daily basis, I'm [inquisitories.](http://inquisitories.tumblr.com) title is "the sun is often out" by patrick wolf.

Newt was five years old when his parents died in a car crash. 

Too young to understand and too young to process the fact that he’d never see his parents again, he was shuttled from England to the US, in order to meet with some long lost relative he’d never heard of, who took him into her care for all of two months before declaring him a ward of the state. 

Before Newt turned six, he’d been to three different homes, across an entire ocean, and to two different states, but a week after his birthday, he was introduced, sullen and out of tears to cry, to a place called The Glade. 

His newest foster assignment was part of this group, and in there, they promised he would find a better way to live. Every Wednesday after school, he was brought to a “playdate”, where a group of thirty or so kids his age wandered the massive playroom of the Glade together, instructed to make friends and learn from each other, or something like that.

The last thing Newt wanted to do was make friends.

For the most part, he shrunk into the back and sat with a coloring book, or a stuffed animal, or nothing, just watching the other kids, arms around his knees and chin resting on top, as if he could be his own personal armor to block out the rest of the world. He just wanted to go home, home home, back to the place with the flowers behind the house with his mum and dad, away from the woman who picked him up and covered his face in lipstick kisses and the brothers and sisters he’d never really asked for. This went on for a full month, of snotty tears cried into the sleeve of his too big shirt and unhappy silences that seemed to scare the other boys and girls away. 

It was one of those Wednesdays when a kid came and plunked down beside him, wordlessly. He was bigger than Newt and had dark skin and dark eyes, and he brought over a huge bag full of blocks, ones Newt had been eyeing a little quietly earlier in the day, hoping to maybe do something over here in his corner. Newt stared at the bag for a second, then back at the kid, who dropped all of the blocks on the carpet in front of them and sat on the other side. 

"Who’re you?"

The other kid lifted his head from where he was picking up red blocks, and just looked at him, muttering, “Albert.” 

He held out a block to Newt, who stared at it like it had two heads, then slowly put his hand on it. “Newt.” 

(An hour later, they’d been building towers all around the back corner of the room—Newt’s missing front teeth made the “t” in his name impossible to say, Albert became “Alby”, and Newt had unwittingly made his first friend.) 

— 

He’d been going to therapy for four years by the time he’d become more acquainted with the rest of the so called “Gladers”. Epic games of hide and seek were starting to take the place of blocks and coloring books, to the point of where the maze-like hallways of the Glade had become a massive game for most of the boys. Newt was fast—he’d been fast since he first got here, trained from running from bullies after telling them rude things he learned from the older Glader boys, but his hiding skills weren’t nearly as good as Minho’s, who claimed he could never, ever be found. (He probably couldn’t be.) 

As it stood, Newt could hear heavy footsteps starting to catch up behind him—must have been Gally, who had been declared it after Thomas caught him in the last round, and only agreed to play again if he could catch Thomas and "punch him"—and Newt dashed across the hallway towards safety, frantically looking for somewhere to hide, when a hand grabbed around his ankle. He yelped and glanced down, only to see a familiar face pop out from underneath the table; the anxiety in his chest loosened immediately, and Newt couldn’t help but return the look of relief Alby gave him, until he dropped down on all fours and joined him underneath the table cloth, covering his mouth to keep from breathing too loud as they sat hip to hip and watched Gally’s footsteps pass by. 

"You scared the klunk out of me," he whispered as soon as he disappeared, smile breaking relieved across his face as Alby returned the favor, a little quirk to his often unsmiling mouth, and they sat and waited for someone else’s scream to break the dead silence. 

— 

Newt was fourteen when he stopped going to therapy and group sessions. 

It wasn’t for long, but it was long enough. His foster parents changed again, and these ones had come to be shown as resentful and distrusting of their new charge, unbelieving of whatever had happened to him, that he was just some punk who got in with the wrong crowd. The arguments and fights escalated until they got physical, and Newt fought back—at four in the morning, a car pulled up to the middle of the driveway, picked Newt up, and sped off into the night. 

"Shucking—bloody, good for nothing, that’s it, just—using me for the bloody money—” was all that came out of his mouth, fury and anger and something so deep and bitter Newt wasn't sure if he could ever bury it back down again, and a hand came across the center console of the beat up old car just as he was feeling like he was going to cry, until it wrapped around Newt’s, thick fingers intertwining with thin, pale ones. 

The car didn’t stop until they made it to an ice cream place in the middle of town; Alby parked the car and turned the lights off, turning around fully in the driver’s seat to get a proper look at Newt. For a few minutes, the younger of the two wanted to just punch something, and he shook his head, cutting off the vitriol and trying to breathe. 

"It’s okay." came Alby’s voice eventually, quiet and just at the point of changing, a husky tone interspersed with the occasional crack, things Newt had ribbed him for for hours (as if he could properly talk), and his thumb stroked across the back of the shaking hand he was just barely holding onto. “They do that to me, too.”

Use him for the money, get mad, Newt didn’t know, or care. A hand came up to scrub at his face, and he exhaled loudly, enough to make a noise in the night. Newt’s gaze dropped from the roof of the car to Alby’s face; he was just looking at him, big, dark eyes and expression just this shy of sympathetic, and Newt snorted under his breath and dropped his head against the headrest. 

He gave his hand a squeeze, and they sat there until the sun came up. 

(He learned later that Alby stole the car from his foster parents in order to get out here in time; Newt howled with laughter and slapped him on the back in congratulations.) 

— 

He returned the favor a month later, when one of the new “gladers” was driving Alby crazy, and Newt pulled him aside and stood with him until he was less likely to murder the kid named Thomas for being a shuckfaced greenie moron. 

He wasn’t sure how he got him to calm down again, but he’d take it. He’d take it any day.  
— 

At fifteen years old, on a sunny day in June, Newt tried to kill himself. 

It didn’t work, because Alby was there before his foster parents were, and if it wasn’t for his quick thinking in calling the hospital, he would have bled out on the concrete where he jumped. 

Newt tried to tell him that he hated him for being there when he woke up again, drugged and “under observation” at the hospital—he was told his leg was shattered, that he’d probably never walk properly again, and that he needed to be seen by a therapist more often. It made Newt want to take up the sheets and bloody hang himself to try again, to be honest, but he woke up after surgery to Alby sitting at his bedside. 

 

And he was angry. 

_How could you think that no one cared about you_ , Alby started, fury in his voice and in his face, and Newt just let him, closed his eyes and let him vent at him, because he thought at that moment that no one in the world could possibly hate him more than he himself did, and that was weirdly comforting, until he heard Alby’s voice break. 

Newt hadn’t heard him cry since the day they first met. Stoic, constantly grumpy Alby, his best friend, was crying, and he wasn’t just crying, he was sobbing. When Newt opened his eyes again to look at him proper, his hand was so tight in Newt’s that he was sure it was going to break, too. 

Before Newt knew it, he was crying too, and when he curled both of his frail looking hands around Alby’s huge one, he nodded at his words, until Alby said with enough conviction that it almost betrayed the tears falling down his cheeks, “Promise me you’ll never do that again, promise me.”

And Newt promised. 

— 

Coming up on seventeen years old, Newt is presented with a block. 

The blonde stares at the red, wooden thing like it’s a ticking time bomb. It’s been ages since he’s been back to the Glade properly, spending time with the gladers out of his own volition instead. The playroom is basically a relic of the forgotten past, and he stares at the block sitting in his locker at school a little more, wondering if someone had stuck it in there as a joke. 

"If you’re lookin’ for the nursery, my locker’s a real stupid place to start," is what he says out loud, just enough for his surrounding friends to hear, and Minho, leaning into the locker beside him, peers over his shoulder. 

"Dude, is that from the Glade?"

Newt rolls his head back to look at him, then tosses it over—Minho catches it with ease, flipping the block around in his hands, “I haven’t seen one of these things in for—whoa.”

Brow furrowing, Newt turns to look at him, shutting the door of the locker with a satisfying clang as Minho abruptly hands the block back to him, grinning like an absolute lunatic and holding up both of his hands. “What?”

Minho’s brows go up and he leans down to pass Newt’s cane back over to him, then takes a step back, “Nothing, man, I just didn’t want to know about your dirty laundry. Congrats.”

"You’re mental," Newt stares right back at him for half a second, reaching down to grab the handle of his cane as Minho folds his arms and leans against the locker, looking entirely too pleased with himself for having just seen a bloody block. So he turns it over in his hands. 

Written on the bottom of the wooden surface, in smooth sharpie, is a couple of words. 

_We should go out.  
-Alby. _

— 

At seventeen and two days old, Newt sits in a diner booth with Alby across from him, his bum leg propped up on the seat beside him and Alby’s big hand resting on his ankle. It’s quiet, but he doesn’t really mind; every touch sends sparks through his skin and Alby still calls him a shuckfaced weirdo for ordering a BLT with no tomatoes. 

He doesn’t really have a chance to be embarrassed about the dumb grin on his face—when his gaze flicks up from his sandwich, Alby’s got the exact same smile on his.

And when he drops him off again, in the car he didn’t steal from his parents, Alby walks him up to the porch, until Newt’s laughing at him. “Proper gentleman, ‘s the nicest I’ve ever seen you.”

Alby does roll his eyes, a flat stare accompanied by a heavensward one usually applied to the freshmen on the football team with him, but they come back to Newt in a couple of seconds, and he resolutely adjusts the bookbag over his shoulder like it’s his own. (It isn’t.) “Don’t tell anyone, there’ll be consequences.”

"I’m bloody terrified." Newt's mouth quirks into a smile, a genuine smile, crooked and little at the corners, and he pauses at the bottom of the steps, looking Alby up and down for a second. This is where it ends, where they part as friends as usual, but there’s an entirely different aura to the air when Alby catches his gaze, and it feels like his skin lights on fire. 

Shuffling forward on his cane, Newt mutters, “So…see you at school tomorrow. Right.”

Alby raises an eyebrow at him, doesn’t say anything else. He doesn’t have to—Newt feels his ears flush and scowls in his direction, “What? I don’t see you doin’ anything about it.”

"Did y’want me to do something about it?"

"Did—are you kidding?" Newt gapes at him for a second, and Alby, the bastard, cracks up laughing. His expression switches in a second and he lifts his cane to smack it against his shins, but his laughter is infectiously rare, and Newt can’t help the grin on his face, stupid and wide and he nudges at him with the cane, muttering, "Slinthead." until he’s stopped, shifting forward to rest both of his hands on the shorter boy’s hips. 

Alby looks up at him again, faint smile left on his face, and Newt sets the butt of his cane back on the ground, flicking his gaze down to match, and Alby mutters, “So, goodnight then.”

“‘Night.” 

There’s a two second silence, and Alby’s head angles, just a little, and Newt mirrors him, heart thumping so fast in his chest it might as well just fly out. 

"…See ya tomorrow."  
"Yeah."

Another couple seconds of silence. 

"Shuck it." Alby mutters, and when he tips forward and presses his mouth to his, Newt’s lips curl up into a smile. 

— 

They wear the same matching, stupid grins holding hands at prom a year later.


End file.
